Sunday, 22 December 2013

Another round of PISA tables has the educational
establishment on the defensive about the UK’s mediocre performance. It’s certainly true the way the comparisons
are made is open to dispute (www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10191157/International-school-league-tables-utterly-wrong.html) and it’s also right to argue that Michael
Gove’s policies continue to undermine teacher trust and lower morale still
further. It’s equally the case that few international organisations associated
with education encourage the social segregation that exists in Britain’s
schools. It’s also important that
educationalists continue to refer to Finland as a high performing country that
has no league tables or primary school tests.

Going on the defensive, or arguing that PISA results
should ‘guide, not drive’ education policy (www.nasuwt.org.uk/Whatsnew/NASUWTNews/PressReleases/index.htm) may be necessary, but it’s not really adequate. With the top
five PISA performers in maths and reading being in East Asia (South Korea tops the overall OECD list, Finland trails in
sixth) there are harrowing reports about the pressures imposed on young people
in these systems. In South Korea in particular, the double shifts they put in and the amount spent on private
tuition

(www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-25187993)
. Rather than just focussing on the
statistical outcomes, it’s important to question the basis of what counts as
‘education’ in the PISA leaders. Most UK children, regardless of their
performance level, would not be prepared to tolerate this sort of environment
and few parents would want them to anyway.

The economic achievements in South Asia cannot be
disputed, but like with all countries the contribution made by education is
just one aspect. With almost any economist able to provide a list of other
variables that also explain growth rates, the ‘education fever’ of Chinese and
South Korean parents is as much a consequence of the changes in these countries
as it’s a cause, but despite booming growth rates and the increased
opportunities for upwards social mobility into professional and managerial
employment however, large numbers will likely be disappointed. Even more so as
East Asian economies begin to slow down.

Yet in the UK, with its increasingly moribund economy,
politicians but also many professional educators, continue to have ‘Too Great
Expectations’ of what schools, colleges and universities are going to achieve
when, the post-recession new jobs created are
just likely to be low skilled and the current generation of young people
facing downward social mobility. As The Guardian’s Peter Wilby concludes
(www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/01/dont-let-pisa-league-tables-dictate-schooling?CMP=twt_gu);
we must not let PISA tables determine how we educate our children. But a
failure to respond to PISA by also asking questions about what education should
be for will leave Michael Gove on the offensive.

Saturday, 21 December 2013

Attempts
are being made to resuscitate the idea that ability is predetermined by our
genes. Recent research by Robert Plomin claims that 60 percent of achievement
in GCSE Maths or Science is genetic. His work is acclaimed by Michael Gove’s
senior adviser Dominic Cummings.

The
idea that academic ability is fixed and innate has damaged generations of
children. Intelligence Tests were used across Britain from the 1920s to 1970s
to separate children from age 11. On this basis, most manual workers’ children
were consigned to poorly funded schools, and left a few years later without
qualifications. These tests supposedly measured an innate intelligence unaffected by
schooling, yet most children were made to practise day after day to raise their
scores.

This divided education was underpinned
by Cyril Burt’s identical twins studies, subsequently exposed as
fraudulent. Internationally, James Flynn
has demonstrated that IQ tests carried out on entire populations show a dramatic
improvement, due to better health and education, within a single generation (known
as the Flynn Effect). This can hardly be the result of rapidly evolving genes.

Few
accept the theory of innate intelligence nowadays but it has a zombie
afterlife. For example, children are frequently divided into ‘ability groups’
from Year 1, diverting attention away from the different opportunities they
have enjoyed including access to books.

Various
attempts have been made to isolate and quantify this ‘innate ability’ by
studying adopted twins. The supposition is that identical twins, with the same
genes, will have widely different environments when adopted. This is a fallacy:
adoptive parents are carefully selected and likely to be quite well off, well
educated and very caring.

Two
sets of research are commonly cited nowadays, both seriously flawed. The US studies,
led by Bouchard, are based on twins who were chosen precisely because of their similarity. In the
Swedish study most of the twins had not lived separate lives; indeed in half
the cases one stayed with mum while the other lived nearby with granny or an
aunt. No wonder they turned out so similar.

Recent
genetic studies have failed to identify the genes. A massive study was
published in 2013, based on scans of 127,000 people, to find the genes
associated with educational attainment: the genes they located accounted for a
mere 0.02% of the difference.

The
latest study, by Robert Plomin’s team in London, uses GCSE results. Its
calculations are based on the ‘equal environments’ myth: i.e. that all siblings
have identical experiences. This is demonstrably untrue since identical twins are
often persuaded into dressing the same or doing things together. They are
likely to be in the same class, have the same maths teachers, work together on
homework and so on.

Based
on this spurious premise of ‘equal environments’, Plomin’s study calculates how
much GCSE results derive from innate ability, and how little from environment and
experience. It fails to look directly at parents’ qualification or income and
how much that correlates with the GCSE grades.

The
mathematical formulae are misleading. If everybody enjoys an excellent
environment (parental care, nutrition, schools, health service etc.), it will
appear that almost 100 percent of the difference between individuals is due to
genetics. For example, if in some Scandinavian country excellent food and
exercise raised the height of young men to between 6 and 7 feet, the
differences between 6 and 7 footers would be ascribed entirely to their genes,
even though the environment had clearly maximised growth.

Plomin’s
work is acclaimed by Gove’s senior adviser Dominic Cummings, who accepts his
claim of 60 percent ‘heritability’ for maths and science. Cummings even claims
that scores in the phonics tests show 70 percent heritability, and uses this to
justify cutting Sure Start programmes.

There
is a contradiction here for the government: are genes or teachers to blame for
low achievement? Both myths, in fact, serve to distract from political
responsibility for child poverty and spending cuts, in an age where the rich
get richer while preaching Austerity.

Thursday, 19 December 2013

Running schools is not the only way to make profits out of
schools. The other way is to turn teaching into an online commodity. Not just
changing the structure and governance of the school system so that in future
state-funded schools can be run for profit, but changing its labour process.

The transformation of schooling in England into a profitable
market through online teaching and learning is also the ambition of other
global players, including Pearson, the largest education company in the world, and
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

Murdoch has embarked on what he calls a "revolutionary
and profitable" move by his media companies into online education. In
2010, News Corporation paid $360 million for a 90 percent stake in Wireless
Generation, a company based in Brooklyn that specialises in education software,
data systems and assessment tools. Also in 2010 he hired Joel Klein, New York
City schools chancellor, as an executive vice president at News Corporation to
oversee the company’s new online educational ventures. Klein’s policy for New
York schools focused on academy-style charter schools and developing a uniform
citywide curriculum, both ideal preparation for entry into Gove’s school system. Gove of course would be a key figure in any
attempt to penetrate the British schools market. The Leveson inquiry revealed
that Gove meets Murdoch frequently (Gove used to be a leader writer on the
Times) and is an enthusiastic backer of the ideas of Joel Klein.

In January 2011 Joel Klein visited the UK as the guest of
the DfE. In June 2011 Murdoch and Klein both spoke at ‘The Times CEO summit’.
Klein called for all pupils to be provided with tablet computers, adding that
he would be "thrilled" if 10 per cent of News Corp's revenues came
from education in the next five years. The Times (June 22 2011) reported the
meeting under the headline ‘Education must join the digital age, says Murdoch’.
It reported that ‘Rupert Murdoch signalled a digital revolution in education
yesterday, saying that News Corporation would help to lead the change in how
children are taught by becoming one of the world’s largest providers of
educational material in the next five years.’

On 26 June 2011 Gove was at yet another dinner with Murdoch.
Three days later he gave the most explicit endorsement to date of News Corp's
education project in an address to the Royal Society entitled Technology in the
Classroom. He said: "We need to change curricula, tests and teaching to
keep up with technology … Whitehall must enable these innovations but not seek
to micromanage them. The new environment of teaching schools will be a fertile
ecosystem for experimenting and spreading successful ideas rapidly through the
system." (29 June 2011)

At the beginning of 2013 Rachel Wolf, who had been appointed
by Gove as director of the New Schools Network, whose function was to help set
up free schools, took up a new job in New York with News Corp's newly launched
education division Amplify, whose chief executive is Joel Klein.

The direction of travel is clear. But transforming the
pedagogy of the English school system, its labour process, into - at least in
part - online education that can make profits - and not just profits but a
higher rate of profit than big international companies can make by investing elsewhere
- is a massive and uncertain task. The foundations, the preconditions, have to
be put into place. And under Gove they already are.

The biggest cost is salaries of teachers. For schools to be
able to afford to buy online teaching they would need to significantly reduce
the number of qualified teachers. But online-based education doesn’t need
qualified teachers. Gove has opened the door by allowing free schools to employ
unqualified staff. The Observer reported on 10 March 2013 that one in ten free
school teachers are unqualified.

Secondly, online education is a transmission model of
teaching with a standardised curriculum (even if progress through it is
individualised). This model is well suited to Gove’s so-called knowledge-based
curriculum, drawing on the model of US educationist E D Hirsch. Thirdly, the
power of the teachers’ unions to resist these changes has to be broken, so
academies aren’t bound by national pay and conditions, and government is in the
process of scrapping these for all schools. And finally teacher training has to
produce new teachers with the right culture, and the best place for that is
schools already operating with that culture, into which trainee teachers can be
assimilated, not university departments where dominant ideologies can be
questioned.

Of course, transforming the labour process of teaching into
an online commodity for profit is a massive challenge. There is a huge weight
of inertia in the system, and there is the risk of both professional and public
opposition and resistance. But it is also the case that online teaching can be
a powerful resource for teachers and pupils, and it can be developed without
the need for profit-hungry private companies.

(Extract from a chapter in Revolution, and Why, and Where Heading? – Review of Gove’s School
Revolution Scrutinised, a pamphlet
from the Socialist Education Association June 2013).

Tuesday, 17 December 2013

I want to explore five aspects or strands of the
way in which we tend to think about assessment.

In calling these strands myths, I am suggesting two
things. First, that they are both powerful and deeply embedded in our
assumptions about assessment: they have become, in other words, common
sense. Second, that they are, in
important ways, untrue and unhelpful, obstacles that make it harder for us to
arrive at more accurate and adequate understandings of assessment.

I should make it clear, too, that what I mean by
assessment here is not formative assessment or assessment for learning, but the regimes of high-stakes, summative
assessment that figure so prominently in the landscape of schooling in this
country.

The effect of high-stakes assessment in distorting
and impeding education has a history, more or less as long as the history of
state education itself. In 1911, Edmond Holmes, an HMI who had resigned in
disgust from the inspectorate, wrote a wonderful little book entitled What is and what might be? The first half of the book speaks directly to
us across the intervening century. Holmes describes a system in which teachers
spoon-feed their pupils, a system in which there is precious little room for
genuine learning to take place:

Why is the teacher so ready to do everything (or
nearly everything) for the children whom he professes to educate? One obvious answer to this question is that
for a third of a century (1862-1895) … "My Lords" required their
inspectors to examine every child in every elementary school in England on a
syllabus which was binding on all schools alike. In doing this, they put a bit
into the mouth of the teacher and drove him, at their pleasure, in this
direction and that. And what they did to him they compelled him to do to the
child (Holmes 1911: 7).

Holmes identifies the
effects of a centralised curriculum, enforced through testing and through
inspection. Within such a system, there
is no space for creativity, no space for dialogue, no space to explore and
exploit the interests and experiences that the learners bring with them. Schooling is a transmission process, driven
by fear.

What is also significant
about Holmes’s account, though, is that he is writing sixteen years after the
ending of the system of payment by results.
What Holmes understood, because he had seen the evidence in the
elementary schools he had visited across the country, was that the pernicious
effects of such systems of control lived on after the systems themselves had
been abandoned.

Within this system, Holmes
identified the crucial effect of assessment:

How did the belief that a formal examination is a worthy end for teacher
and child to aim at, and an adequate test of success in teaching and in
learning, come to establish itself in this country? And not in this country
only, but in the whole Western world? In every Western country that is
progressive and "up to date," ... the examination system controls
education, and in doing so arrests the self-development of the child, and
therefore strangles his inward growth.

What is the explanation of this significant fact? .... The Western belief in the efficacy of
examinations is a symptom of a widespread and deep-seated tendency – the
tendency to judge according to the appearance of things, to attach supreme
importance to visible "results," to measure inward worth by outward
standards, to estimate progress in terms of what the "world" reveres
as "success" (Holmes 1911: 8-9).

Holmes was describing an education system in which
the tail of assessment wagged the dog of learning. How familiar.

Myth 1: learning is linear

Since the imposition, twenty years ago, of the
National Curriculum and its attendant levels and level descriptors, it has
become increasingly hard to challenge the assumption that learning happens in
predictable, identifiable and incremental stages. Increasingly, too, the levels of the National
Curriculum are broken down into sub-levels, in an attempt to describe ever more
precisely the progress that learners have made – and also to set ever more
precise targets for their future progress. The attainment of literacy or
numeracy becomes inextricably associated with achieving a level four before the
end of primary education, while press and politicians are quick to make
headlines with the assumption that those who have not been awarded a level four
are therefore illiterate, innumerate.

The problem with all of this is that it is not
true. At best, the National Curriculum
level descriptors are an attempt to describe what progression in a subject
might look like. But learning itself is a much messier, more complicated
business than the linear scale of levels or GCSE grades would suggest.

What happens day by day in the classroom depends on
factors other than the learners’ existing or target levels: it depends on their
interests and experiences beyond school, and whether they can make connections
between these interests and experiences and the school curriculum. It depends on the learners’ motivation.

Even within subjects, such as maths, where learning
seems more easily accommodated to the paradigm of linear progression, learners’
understanding of, say, number can be at a markedly different stage of
development from their understanding of shape, space and measure.

Within subjects such as English, where development
more obviously involves social and emotional aspects alongside intellectual
processes, and where learners’ development as speakers and listeners does not
bear any simple or constant relationship to their development as readers and
writers, the attempt to place their progress at a single point on a single
linear scale is neither meaningful nor educationally justifiable.

What this amounts to is a bad case of reification,
more infectious and far more damaging than swine flu: levels that were, at
most, ways of gesturing broadly at progression have been transformed under the
pressure of particular forms of accountability into things, as if levels had
the same solidity and materiality as, say a child’s shoe size.

So one encounters with wearying regularity children
who announce that they “are” a level six, or a level three (the former with
pride verging on smugness, the latter with an air of resignation, a meek
acceptance that literacy, or even learning, is not really their thing).

Even more worryingly, the reification process has
affected the way that teachers talk about their pupils – so “she’s a level
five” or “he’s a level four” are now not so much shorthand expressions, standing
for more complicated pictures of a learner’s development, as bald statements of
fact.

Myth 2: learning is context-independent

The idea that learning happens in a vacuum, as it
were, and hence that learning can be measured in isolation from the context in
which it happened, is closely linked to the myth of linearity. It is another aspect of the same reductive
approach to learning, an approach that seeks to isolate sub-skills and then
assess whether the sub-skill has been acquired without any reference to the
contexts in which such skills might be used and developed.

Once again, it is an attempt to sidestep the messy
contingencies of real learning, substituting in its place the thin abstractions
of the easily transmitted and easily measured.

Always and everywhere, classrooms are populated by
real people with particular histories, experiences, cultures. Learning involves these people interacting
with each other and with particular materials – with particular problems,
particular texts, particular resources.

Myth 3: learning is individual

Deeply implicated in the history of schooling in
this country is the assumption that learning is the property of an individual,
that learning happens inside a single learner’s head. It is a myth that is nurtured by, and helps
to sustain, the sense of self that is central to bourgeois culture and
values. Plagiarism, the Manichean other
of intellectual property, is the cardinal sin within the religion of schooling
precisely because it entails a transgression of this article of faith, learning
as the property of the individual.

With glorious circularity, we know that learning is
individual because the assessment regimes constantly demonstrate that this is
the case. Assessment, predicated on the
commonsense assumption that learning happens in an individual’s head, proceeds
to provide opportunities for the individual to demonstrate this learning, in
circumstances – such as the exam hall – where normal human interactions are
absolutely forbidden, and then offers conclusive proof of the validity of the
procedure by arriving at differential assessments for different individuals: to
one a level five, to another a grade A, and so on.

It is in such routines of assessment that the role
of education as a sorting mechanism becomes most obvious. Assessment separates sheep from goats,
high-fliers from also-rans, leaders of men from hewers of wood. It underpins the notion of meritocracy and it
sustains the illusion that social justice can be achieved through social
mobility.

The myth of the isolated individual, the learner as
examination candidate, filters out all that we know about the reality of
distributed learning, all we know about learners as irreducibly social beings,
situated in history and in culture.

Myth 4: the assessment of learning is objective and
reliable

The dominant discourses of schooling are based on
the myth of reliable assessment. In the
creation of this myth, one of the things that happens is that assessment
processes assume a kind of autonomy, independent of human agency.

But assessment is always a social practice. It always involves the exercise of
judgement. It is always conducted for
specific purposes by particular people.
Only in the most trivial cases is assessment merely a matter of measuring. And reliability comes at a cost: the more
reliable a test, the less information it can provide about the breadth of a
child’s learning and development. There
is, in other words, an inverse relationship between reliability and validity
(Alexander 2010: 320-1).

Myth 5: high stakes assessment is vital for
accountability

The argument here is not over whether schools
should be accountable – of course they should – but over the role of testing in
achieving accountability. The whole machinery of National Curriculum levels and
sub-levels does not make it easier for parents and carers to find out about
their children’s progress; it is a barrier in the way of communication between
teachers and parents, a professionalist jargon impenetrable to most people.

The myth that national assessment frameworks
introduced accountability ignores other forms of accountability such as
parents’ evenings and school reports. To
make this statement is not to claim that such systems of accountability are
perfect – they aren’t – but the imposition of high-stakes testing has done
nothing to address their shortcomings.
As the Cambridge Primary Review reminds us, parents and carers want to
know, among other things, whether their children are happy (Alexander 2010:
316). And there is not, as yet, a National Curriculum level for happiness.

There is also a massive problem in conflating the
assessment of individual learners with judgements about the effectiveness of
teachers, schools or local authorities.
Most obviously, using aggregated test data as an accountability measure
tends to leave much that is relevant out of the account: it ignores the
particular contexts of schools and their communities, and it ignores all the
other aspects of a school’s work that lie beyond the preparation of pupils for
high-stakes tests.

Worse than this, such accountability measures
always and inevitably distort schools’ and teachers’ priorities, encouraging an
exclusive focus on the curricular areas that are to be tested, on those aspects
of a subject that are to be tested (reading and writing rather than speaking
and listening, say), on the students who lie at the threshold of success (the
3a/4c pupils, the C/D borderlines, and so on).

To conclude, I want to return to Edmond Holmes’s
picture of schooling a hundred years ago.
Two aspects of this picture seem salient to me – and horribly
contemporary. First, that education has
become a commodity: children and their learning are reduced to test scores,
mere units of analysis. The process is
epitomised by the new verb meaning, tolevel: this is the process that
teachers are engaged in, a process that flattens and renders invisible all that
is distinctive, all that is interesting, about real learners.

Second, that what the system values – and demands –
of all its participants, teachers and pupils alike, is compliance – neither
originality nor creativity, neither judgement nor responsiveness to individual
circumstance, neither questioning nor imagination, but mere mechanical
compliance.

Except, of course, this is not a conclusion, simply
a diagnosis. For us, as for Edmond
Holmes, the task is not just to see what is, but to begin to envisage, and to
work towards, what might be.

References

Alexander, R., ed. (2010) Children, their World, their Education:
final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, London
& New York: Routledge.

In
the dominant educational discourse, there is a simple answer to this
question.

This
is the Ofsted model, a view of learning promulgated by everyone from former
Ofsted chief Chris Woodhead to current Ofsted head Michael Wilshaw and that has
been normalised in school practices by two decades of the inspection regime.

The
Ofsted model looks something like this: Learning is the product of teaching,
the output produced by definite, pre-specified and discernible inputs. It
happens in individuals. It is linear. It
is easily measured, not only through standardised tests but also through more
immediate metrics (question and answer sessions, traffic lights, exit passes
and a cornucopia of other lesson plenaries).

I
want to question each of these assumptions.
Before I do so, however, it is worth exploring why this model is so
seductive – and who has been seduced by it.

For
governments of a technical-rationalist bent it provides the perfect managerial
tool, since it enables the complexity of schooling to be reduced to data –
solid, comfortable, numerical data – data that enable robust comparisons to be
made between individual learners and groups of learners, between teachers and
schools.

For
if this is what learning looks like, it is entirely reasonable to represent
learning as a national curriculum level: learning to read then becomes the same
thing as attaining a level 4. The level 4 becomes a thing in itself, and
literacy levels can be ascertained by nothing more complex than totting up the
number of learners who are proud possessors of a level 4.

There
is a further stage to this process of reification (turning abstractions like
levels into concrete things), and it is a particularly grisly stage: the child
becomes the level. Thus it is that teachers refer to learners along the lines
of “She’s a level 5” or “He’s a level 3” – and children talk about themselves
in the same terms: “I am a 4c.”

The
next stage in this process is that six-year-olds are to be deemed to have
learnt how reading works if they make the right noises when confronted with
forty decontextualised words (or non-words).
(If they make the wrong noises more than six times, they will already be
judged to be on the slippery slope to terminal illiteracy.)

This
process of reification matters hugely.
It transforms learning and learners into data and schools into data-rich
environments. Equally important, though, is the assumption that learning is
straightforwardly the product of teaching.
This means that teachers, individually and collectively, can be held
directly accountable for learning (the learning that is represented in those
neat data-sets).

The
implications of this are made explicit in the recent Ofsted Evaluation
Schedule: “The most important role of teaching is to promote learning so as to
raise pupils’ achievement” (Ofsted 2012: 11). It is worth pausing to note that
learning here appears, very clearly, not as an end in itself but as a means to
an end: learning is for raising achievement.
One might also want to ask what raising achievement is for. Is it for the benefit of the learner, the
teacher, the school, the nation?

Elsewhere
in the same Ofsted document, the official meaning of “achievement” is spelled
out:

When
judging achievement, inspectors should take account of:

• pupils’ attainment in relation to
national standards and compared to all schools, based on data over the last
three years ...

• pupils’ progress in the last three years
as shown by value-added indices for the school overall and for different groups
of pupils, together with expected rates of progress

• the learning and progress of pupils
currently in the school based on inspection evidence (Ofsted 2012: 6).

Each
of these three sources of “evidence” raises its own problems. The first, which,
in effect, frames and informs every Ofsted inspection, could be summed up by
the title of one of Michael Wilshaw’s recent speeches: “High expectations, no
excuses” (Wilshaw 2012) In the Ofsted
model, raw results are the measure of every school and every pupil – and to
suggest otherwise is to hide behind mere “excuses”. This fits in well with Wilshaw’s mythological
approach to the history of schooling:

Certainly,
Ofsted was key in transforming my life as a teacher and headteacher. Our
education system is much better because of greater accountability in the
system. Those who think we haven’t made progress need to remember what it was
like before Ofsted. I certainly do. In the seventies and eighties, when I
worked in places like Peckham, Bermondsey, Hackney and West Ham, whole generations
of children and young people were failed.

The
school where I was head before moving to Ofsted, Mossbourne Academy in Hackney,
stands on the site of Hackney Downs School, which in its day represented the
worst excesses of that period. But there would have been many others just as
bad that never hit the headlines and got away with blue murder (Wilshaw 2012).

In
describing this account as a myth, I am not suggesting that everything in the
garden was lovely before Ofsted came along.
Young people were failed by the education system before Ofsted – but
they are still being failed by the education system today. And there are other stories to tell of
Hackney Downs, stories of exemplary work by dedicated teachers, stories of
local curricula developed collaboratively, stories of a shared commitment to
social justice.

There
is, too, in Wilshaw’s version of history a crucial sleight of hand: the fact
that Mossbourne stands on the site where Hackney Downs once stood might lead
one to assume that the intake of the two schools was also the same – and that
really would be a mistake. If your
school wants to play the Ofsted game in relation to achievement, the first
thing to sort out is the admissions policy.

The
second source of Ofsted’s evidence on achievement might look much more nuanced,
more attuned to issues of diversity.
After all, the mention of “value-added” suggests an awareness that
learners are different, come from different kinds of home, have different needs,
and so on.

But
one shouldn’t get too carried away by this vestige of New Labour. There is
still the assumption that learning is a matter of linear progress, still an
obsession with the reductive abstractions of units of data. Accountability becomes nothing more than data
tracking and monitoring, equality is reduced to questions of access and social
mobility.

What
matters here are the questions that cannot be asked: questions about curriculum
content and design, questions about students’ different histories, cultures,
funds of knowledge, values, affiliations and aspirations. These things matter because they shape
profoundly students’ sense of themselves as learners and their day-to-day
experiences in the classroom.

The
third source of evidence about achievement embodies the assumption that
judgements about the learning and achievement of pupils can or should be based
on twenty minutes or so of lesson observation.

Before
I launch into what is wrong with this assumption, I should make a couple of
things clear. I believe that teachers
and schools should be accountable. I
also believe that that accountability should involve the observation of lessons
by a range of different people, including people who are not teachers.

What
gets missed out of the Ofsted model, however, is any sense of complexity – the
complexity of classrooms, the complexity of the interactions that take place
within them, the complexity of any halfway adequate understanding of learning
as a process.

The
Wilshaw version is breathtakingly simple.
Schools are “good” or “outstanding” – or they are not (and if they are
not, they “require improvement”). If a school is “outstanding”, the teaching is
similarly “outstanding”; if a school is less than “good”, the pupils suffer
from an unremitting diet of less-than-good teaching.

These
reified judgements about a school are themselves an abstraction from a series
of separate abstractions, reified judgements of individual teachers and
individual lessons. Just as learners
become the level that is attached to them, so teachers become “outstanding” or
“satisfactory” – sorry, “requiring improvement”.

Of
course, if someone tells you that you are outstanding, it tends to make you
feel better about yourself – and even to accept the validity of the label.
That’s why the process can be seductive for teachers, too. If, on the other hand, someone tells you that
you’re merely satisfactory, that can be pretty devastating – and it is hard not
to internalise this judgement.

This
grading system has two pernicious effects.
The first is that it tends to undermine collegiality, to produce in
reality the atomised, divided, individualist system that it purports to
describe. It has the same corrosive
effect on teacher identity as the testing regime has on learner identity.

The
second is that it adversely influences teaching itself. It encourages teachers to teach to the Ofsted
model, to reconfigure their practice to conform to their sense of what is
prescribed. Learning becomes bite-sized,
specified by objectives or “outcomes”, measurable within the space of a single
lesson, or even a single activity within a lesson.

In
the first phase of Ofsted, this was less significant. Teachers might vary their practice when the
inspectors came to call, giving them the lessons that they understood they
wanted to see, but would generally revert to more diverse pedagogies in the
spaces in between inspections.

Now,
however, the problem is less Ofsted itself than Ofsted-in-the-head: enforced
through the monitoring and observation of school management teams and
consultants, the routines have become internalised. The danger then becomes that we all take the
Ofsted model as valid, as if it told the truth about learning or teaching, as
if the labels were the reality.

I
want to finish by returning to my initial representation of the Ofsted model,
to propose alternatives to each of its foundational assumptions.

1. Learning is the product of teaching, the
output produced by definite, pre-specified and discernible inputs.

No,
it’s not. Teachers have a responsibility to plan for learning and to intervene
in the learning process, to introduce learners to new concepts, new
experiences, new ways of seeing themselves, each other and the world. But learning is unpredictable, messy and
polymorphous; it is contested, mysterious and often elusive.

2. It happens in individuals.

No,
it doesn’t. Learning is irreducibly
social and hugely contingent. It
involves – and arises out of – the interaction of human beings with each other,
with particular resources in particular places.

3. It is linear.

No,
it’s not. The idea that someone has to
master the basics before they can progress to more advanced stuff is deeply
problematic. And it is simply false to
assume that something is learnt once and for all: learning is recursive,
layered, and multidimensional. Getting a picture of what learners know or can
do is worthwhile, but always fraught with difficulty. (A child holding up a green card at the end
of a lesson isn’t hard evidence of anything other than a desire to please the
teacher.)

4. It is easily measured, not only through
standardised tests but also through more immediate metrics

No,
no, no. The only things to do with learning that are easily measured are things
so trivial as not to be worth bothering with in the first place. Real, worthwhile learning is always complex,
and it tends to happen – and be observable – over much longer periods of time
than a single lesson. Teachers have an understanding of learning that is
inseparable from their long-tem, always-changing, picture of learners and their
development: that is what makes teaching both difficult and massively
rewarding.

References

Ofsted
(2012) The evaluation schedule for the inspection of maintained schools and
academies January 2012, No. 090098.
Available online at
<http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/evaluation-schedule-for-inspection-of-maintained-schools-and-academies-january-2012>

Wilshaw,
M. (2012) “High expectations, no excuses” (speech to the London Leadership
Strategy’s Good to Great conference, 9 February 2012). Available online at
<http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/news/high-expectation-no-excuses-sir-michael-wilshaw-hmci-outlines-changes-ofsted-inspection-drive-delive-0>

I’ve sometimes said that reading books in schools is a
subversive activity. This seems counter-intuitive. Schools are surely places
which foster the idea that the written text is one of the best means of
carrying ideas and knowledge.

On close examination,
it’s possible to see that a) one kind of written text dominates the
scene and b) one kind of reading dominates. That’s to say, the texts are
predominantly instructive, didactic full of closed-ended – or at best – Socratic
questions which tie the learner to answering exactly as the apparent author of
the texts (text-book author, teacher, examiner ?) demands.

So, right from the
earliest years, children are confronted with texts that are, say, supposedly
teaching the child how to read (synthetic phonics and reading schemes), moving
on remarkably soon to ‘comprehension’ texts and worksheets, in which children
are asked factual questions about supposed facts in the text they have just
read, moving on to many variations of this, right the way to GCSE.

Of course, the purpose and function of reading in society
is much more than this. In one sense, we can say that the world’s wisdom has up
until fairly recently been captured in books. Of course, there are other
sources for ideas – the electronic media in all their complexity, and that
traditional means – talk and, more importantly, we shouldn’t think of one part
of the inter-mediate world as excluding another.

Books aren’t in contradiction with the internet,
say. However, if we exclude the reading
of whole books from the reading diet of someone – or whole groups of people – a
serious deprivation is taking place.

At one level, this deprivation is about specificity and
the other about heterodoxy. That’s to
say, on account of the economics of book-publishing over many centuries, it is
nearly always true to say that whatever a person’s specific needs and
curiosities, it’s possible to find a book that fits it. What’s more, on account
of that publishing history, the world of books contains thousands of texts
which defy the dominant ideas of the day.

At another level, it’s possible to say that there is
something significant about browsing. What is browsing? It’s the scanning of
texts in order to find out what you want. Browsing involves comparing,
contrasting, selecting – and most importantly – the setting up of informal and
formal ‘sets’.

Children given regular opportunities to browse and sort
piles of books, magazine, comics and the like will do these things. And what
are they? The very processes that thousands of tedious worksheets try to
‘teach’: compare, contrast, select and group.

It could be argued that most of education is based around
these practices. I’ve seen six year olds sorting their comics or books over and
over again, doing just this. It’s a crucial textual practice which schools try
to teach but which takes place in certain kinds of homes (ie the ones with many
books) every day.

We also know that when I say ‘certain homes’, the
implication is that I mean ‘middle class’ or ‘educated’ or ‘professional’.
True, mostly, but not entirely so. There are some specific instances where
homes where the parent or parents have reason to provide many books, magazines
and comics for their children or for themselves or both – politics being one of
them.

My father came from a working-class ‘vertical’ family
home with mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles (and no father) present. Two
or three of them were highly politicised, filling the house with pamphlets,
newspapers, books (and talk about those books) and took full advantage of the
local library in a systematic, regular way.

A vast longitudinal study from the University of Nevada,
involving tens of thousands of children across 27 countries has discovered the
same thing. That’s to say, independent of class/income and education, the
presence of many books (eg 500) in a home has an add-on effect of 3 years more
take-up of schooling by the child(ren) from such a home.

This sort of thing has been known informally and formally
by teachers for decades. In the days
when every big school in a working-class area would have at least one child
whose parent or parents were active in, say, trade unions, the Labour Party or
other left parties, teachers knew that that child was being exposed to something
significant in the way of literacy, language and thought. Politicians have known it and have been told
it many times over – some of them by me! But, significantly, they do nothing
about it.

Why is that? Because they work to a different model of
literacy, knowledge and education. For them, it must be instructional,
instrumental (that’s to say there must be evidence that what’s being taught
must ‘do’ something), and functional (that’s to say the thing that it’s ‘doing’
must be seen to have a ‘use’ ).

Reading for pleasure in this scheme of things is an
extra, a suitable leisure activity, or even something too complicated for the
lower orders – even though the evidence I’m citing shows precisely the
opposite. If you like it’s more instructional, more instrumental, more
functional – and a lot more besides – than the stuff that is dished up in the
name of literacy, knowledge and education: the worksheets, reading schemes,
exercises, text books and the like that dominate education.

When I say – ‘and a lot more besides’ – what do I mean?
This is where we confront the issue of ‘literature’ which I’ll broadly define
as ‘figurative writing’ – that’s to say kinds of writing in which the main
beings/creatures/humans in the piece along with many of the objects and aspects
of ‘nature’ are there in unreal, metaphorical, allegorical, representational
ways. They are ‘acting out’ scenes and ideas.

These processes, which we find in poems, stories, plays,
films and the like, combine ideas with feelings – their own and the
readers’/viewers’/listeners’. And these ideas and feelings appear to be
attached to the beings in the literature as they ‘act out’ the events in their
existence.

The business of combining ideas and feelings is crucial.
This is how we are affected by what happens.
We say we are ‘touched’ even as we evaluate the rightness/wrongness,
fairness/unfairness etc of how the beings are behaving.

What’s really interesting from an educational point of
view is that at any given moment (I’ll come back to that moment), that
evaluating act can suddenly dominate and the audience (let’s say a class of
young people) will want to discuss values and ethics of what’s going on. This is crucial.

One of the fundamental tenets underlying education is
that it will enable children to generalise about themselves, events and the
world in order to spot patterns or even to give names to phenomena so that they
can be seen as not random one-off events.
So we might imagine that education will enable young people to think and
talk about, let’s say, injustice, envy, power, anger and the like.

Open-ended engagement with literature is one of the ways
in which we can all get handles on these difficult and important ideas. In fact, it’s the easiest, most accessible
way in which we can do it. Anyone who has sat with young children reading and
talking will find that inevitably, one arrives at these moments where the ideas
about the feelings (but also with the feelings) become important.

So, drawing all these thoughts together, I come to the
conclusion that schools should be places that should strain every part of
themselves to foster reading for pleasure: in class, in break-times, after
school and in the children’s/students’ homes.

This involves some very practical work: asking the parents
to set up some kind of reading committee which has the job of getting books
into the hands of children of all backgrounds; creating a relationship with
local libraries that goes beyond the tokenistic nod eg arranging to issue
tickets to reception and year 1 children; creating regular ‘book events’ with
authors,talks, films, music; making the connection between all school
activities and books that relate to them eg in relation to trips, sports,
projects, changes in the school; involving all school-workers and staff in this
book project – eg caretakers, dinner and cleaning staff particularly as many of
them will be parents or ex-parents of pupils; re-thinking ‘literacy’ as ‘many
literacies’ ie involving all languages, different means of ‘delivery’ eg newspapers,
phone apps, computer screens, graphic design and therefore on the back of that,
engaging practitioners, especially parents, in all those fields to come into
schools in order to share with the children/students what they’re doing.;
thinking of everything that children write as potential scripts for publishing
or performing with outlets such as school websites, informal magazines,
classroom ‘sketches’, plays, cabarets, parent-child book-making etc etc central
to literacy for all.

Put all that together and we have a theory and practice
of universal literacy in schools. This is an urgent part of our demands for
emancipation and liberation for all.

I want
to start with the words of someone not obviously connected with the recent (and
ongoing) furore over GCSE grades. G.S.
Gordon was the second Professor of English at Oxford. This is him writing to his wife in 1910 –
it’s the last paragraph of a longer letter:

I hope the new maid is as illiterate and competent as ever. It would be
a sad day if she took to reading at her age! That’s how Socialists are made.

(Gordon 1943: 44)

There
is a direct link between Professor Gordon’s views and those of Michael Gove.
Both are fully paid-up subscribers to the rationing school of education. This is predicated on the idea that, as
another right-wing ideologue had it, ‘More will mean worse’ (that was Kingsley
Amis, bemoaning the expansion of higher education in 1960). From this
perspective, opening up education to the masses means a dilution of standards,
so the masses must be kept out. Gove and
Ofqual have now decided that fewer will mean better.

The right
are fond of using the lexis of economics to advance their policies in
education. A-levels are the ‘gold standard.’ (No, they aren’t. The gold
standard was abandoned in the 1920s, a moment that upset Churchill and a bunch
of other British imperialists.) What we must now guard against is ‘grade
inflation’. There is precious little
evidence that this is a real phenomenon; what is undeniably true is that more
students have been getting higher grades.
There are two pretty obvious reasons for this:

(i)more students are working harder, getting better grades because they
realise that in the current economic climate this might possibly lead to
(better) jobs.

(ii)schools, under immense pressure from league tables and Ofsted, have
become more and more adept at meeting the production targets (intervention
groups and so on).

Suddenly,
this success is a bad thing. It doesn’t
sit well with the new austerity programme.
So Gove and his mates at Ofqual abandon two decades of criterion
referencing and go back to the bad old days of norm referencing. You don’t get a grade C because your work
meets the specified criteria for a grade C; you get a C if you are in the top x
per cent of a cohort.

And
somehow this new system is meant to be more rigorous. This word rigour has become
a stick to beat the GCSEs with.

Now,
there might have been problems with GCSEs, but we shouldn’t forget that they
were the first set of public exams in this country that were pretty much a
universal qualification. Having one exam for everyone (instead of the separate
O-levels and CSEs that they replaced) was a progressive move, even if it was
always fraught with contradictions. And there has been a fairly consistent
strand in the development of the GSCEs that has been about making knowledge
more accessible. This isn’t the same thing at all as debasing standards. But it looks that way if what you’re about is
maintaining exclusivity.

What
Gove means by rigour is something else entirely:

It was an
automatic assumption of my predecessors in Cabinet office that the education
they had enjoyed, the culture they had benefitted from, the literature they had
read, the history they had grown up learning, were all worth knowing. They
thought that the case was almost so self-evident it scarcely needed to be made.
To know who Pericles was, why he was important, why acquaintance with his
actions, thoughts and words mattered, didn’t need to be explained or justified.
It was the mark of an educated person. And to aspire to be educated, and be
thought of as educated, was the noblest of ambitions.

(Gove 2011)

Gove
doesn’t just want to ration access to education; he wants to keep it just as it
used to be, in the good old days (that never were). The schooling that was good enough for
Gladstone is good enough for Gove and good enough for the youth of today.

There
is a mad circularity about all of this, a circularity that is a denial of
history, of progress, of development. No
single sphere of human knowledge or activity is the same now as it was when
Gladstone went to school. Knowing about
Pericles is good and fine – but shouldn’t the youth of today also know
something about particle physics? Even
literature has moved on a bit – different texts have been produced, some of
them involving all sorts of fancy new technologies, like moving pictures and so
forth.

What
this means is that the concept of rigour really isn’t terribly straightforward.
Knowledge is differently constructed now, in the world, and it is entirely
appropriate that schooling should reflect these differences.

This
may seem a long way away from our current concerns about GCSE grades, but what
Gove is now proposing, on the back of the grading scandal, is the abolition of
GCSEs and the imposition of something much more like O-levels (even if the
Liberals won’t let him call them that).

This
is Gove taking us back to a very Gladstonian future. The argument is about
assessment, for sure, but it is also about the content of education. Look
at the new Teachers’ Standards: central control of pedagogy (synthetic phonics
as mandatory), curriculum (all teachers responsible for promoting ‘the correct
use of Standard English’) and a particularly reactionary set of values (British
values, the rule of law, and so forth).

Of
course, Gove’s position is more contradictory than this. He wants to ration
education through capping the number of students who can achieve particular
grades. But simultaneously he raises the
‘floor standard’ – demanding that in all secondary schools at least 40 per cent
of students attain 5 GCSEs at A*- C. These two policy elements are completely
incompatible. And they lead the way to more forced academy conversions.

This
word rigour has become a stick to beat teachers with.

Externally
set and marked exams are a very blunt instrument. But, of course, if the function of the
assessment is to act as a sorting mechanism, then exams do the job perfectly
well. If the aim is to arrive at a
certain quota of sheep, or A-level students, then why waste time on anything more
nuanced?

What
happened in the summer was that students who had been predicted a grade C –
students whose teachers were pretty confident that they should get a grade C –
ended up with grade Ds. It is a stark case of grade deflation. But I want to focus attention on this
business of prediction.

In
most spheres of life, when we talk about predictions, we measure these against
actual events. So the weather forecast is a prediction about what the weather
will be like, at a particular time and in a particular place. The forecast uses
evidence, of various kinds and varying degrees of sophistication. The question of the accuracy of a weather
forecast is easily determined: we can test it out by what actually happens. Did
it rain today?

Likewise
predictions about horse-racing are testable against the race itself. If I give
you a tip for the 4.30 at Newbury, you are entitled to judge the usefulness and
the accuracy of the tip, and probably of me as a tipster, by what actually
happens in the 4.30 at Newbury.

Now,
the commonsense approach to predicted GCSE grades would be the same as outlined
above. An English teacher predicts a
grade C for her student; he gets a grade D; the prediction was wrong,
demonstrably, because the prediction did not match what actually happened in
the exam.

But
this is nonsense. A GCSE exam is not
like the 4.30 at Newbury. The claims that a GCSE result purports to make about
a student are not limited to what happened in an exam hall on a particular
afternoon in June: they are claims about what that student knows and can do, in
relation to a range of texts and practices that have been gathered together
under the heading of ‘English’.

In
fact – in the real world where people talk, read and write a variety of
different texts for different audiences and purposes – that GCSE student’s
English teacher is in the best position to say what that student knows and can
do. In this situation, then, the
prediction shouldn’t really be construed as a prediction at all: it is a
statement based on detailed, in-depth professional knowledge, from someone who
has been able to build up a picture of that student’s learning and development
over time. The teacher has a mass of
evidence on which to base this professional judgement – evidence much more robust because it is more
plentiful and also because it is much more diverse than the evidence that can
be provided by a single exam.

Now
all of the above is true, I think, even in a situation where what the student
does in the exam is subjected to fair, transparent, criterion-referenced
assessment procedures. What about in a
situation where the grade boundaries are manipulated to satisfy a higher
power’s arbitrary judgements about how many students should be awarded a particular
grade?

And,
let’s be clear, that is precisely what happened this summer. That’s what Ofqual’s report tells us. They decided that the proportion of students
who were awarded grade C or above should be adjusted downwards because, among
other reasons, there were more private school students entered for alternative
qualifications (the iGCSE, say), and so they made the assumption that the
calibre of the cohort entered for the GCSE would be poorer than in the previous
year. And guess what? As the TES
revealed (28 September), the students who have been hit hardest by the shift in
the grade boundaries have been working class and minority ethnic students. What
exactly does rigour mean in these circumstances?

This
word rigour has become a weapon in Gove’s class war.

What
we need to do is to develop a clear, coherent alternative – an alternative
model of curriculum and assessment, in the interests of the mass of students,
not a privileged minority. And we need to be prepared to argue for this
alternative.